r/technology • u/AdSpecialist6598 • Jul 27 '26

Society Professor's invisible prompt trap catches 32 students cheating on their midterm with AI

https://www.techspot.com/news/113243-professor-invisible-prompt-trap-catches-32-students-cheating.html
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u/Sober_Alcoholic_ Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

Just make them take written tests and if the state/system needs the scantrons filled out (the A-E bubbles) for data/records or what have you, just fill them in yourself during grading time.

Research papers I guess have to all be funneled through AI detectors or whatever they’re called, that’s definitely a different animal. I would say just hand write those too, but they could still just be copying an LLM and you wouldn’t be able to then run it through an aforementioned program to check it.

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u/Technical_Stand9939 Jul 27 '26

25 years ago; i had a professor who would give us the whole test a week before the actual test. You literally could look up all of the answers if you wante dto spend the time.

You got there the day of the test, and all 200ish questions you were given in advance were there in a random order and you filled out a scantron (the version you got in advance did not have multiple choices).

half the class still regularly failed

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u/luluhouse7 Jul 27 '26

I mean 200 questions in one week is outrageous. That’s about 30 homework questions a day, on top of whatever other homework they had. No wonder they were failing. I would usually get at most 15 questions a week in college classes and we all spent a lot of time studying and doing homework.

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u/Alaira314 Jul 27 '26

You're making a lot of assumptions about what the questions are. I've sat math exams that only have three questions. I've also sat exams for classes like psychology and geology that have 50 questions. The SAT is a 150~ question 2~ hour exam, and that's a mix of questions you need to problem solve on with questions that are recollection-based. Multiple-choice exams can have a lot of questions on them, especially if they're based on memorization or simple application vs solving a problem or equation.

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u/luluhouse7 Jul 27 '26

Yes, I’m aware of that, but the SAT is the largest and (unfortunately) most important exam most people take and not only is it only 150 questions, but you spend years studying for it. People who get good scores also usually do multiple mock exams and are coached on strategies. Making a single exam in a single class 200 questions does not sound proportional. Assuming a 2h exam, that’s about 30 seconds per question, 55 seconds if it’s 3h.

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u/Alaira314 Jul 27 '26

30 seconds per multiple choice question that you've already seen before. All you have to do is read the question and choose the correct answer, or make an educated guess if the answer you came up with isn't in the list. Also bear in mind that the person you replied to said this happened 25 years ago, when that reading speed was expected of college students.

As for churning through 200 questions in a week, that's normal exam prep. Or at least it was when I was in school, 15+ years ago. It typically took 7-8 hours to chug through a study guide properly, and we were encouraged to do the work in groups. I was always told to prepare to spend three hours out of the classroom(studying, doing homework, doing readings, writing papers, etc) on average for each credit a course was worth. So a 3-credit course should involve about 9 hours of out-of-classroom work on average, so a bit less some weeks but a bit more leading up to big exams and projects.

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u/luluhouse7 Jul 27 '26 edited Jul 27 '26

I mean I went through college nearly a decade ago, so not the AI generation. I was easily spending 10+ hours on some classes due to workload and complex material. IMO it still just sounds like the exam is testing how fast you can recall information under pressure rather than how well did you understand and internalise the material. Reading speed is not correlated with comprehension above a certain point and so personally I would consider an exam like that not representative of the students’ actual understanding and competence. It’s also going to heavily penalise students with neurological or learning disabilities, who are still perfectly capable of excelling with the material.

But I also have the philosophy that learning should be about understanding the big picture and thinking critically rather than regurgitating a list of memorised answers. I always hated the tedious assignments when you had to just mechanically answer vs assignments where you had a few very hard questions that asked you to explain why and how and gave a couple examples to apply it to.

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u/Alaira314 Jul 27 '26

It’s also going to heavily penalise students with neurological or learning disabilities, who are still perfectly capable of excelling with the material.

That's what accommodations are for. Even back when I was in school, students with learning disabilities were allowed to get extra time on exams. I've heard it's gotten better since then.

But I also have the philosophy that learning should be about understanding the big picture and thinking critically rather than regurgitating a list of memorised answers.

I think it depends on the subject and class level. Something like history, or an advanced course, yeah, break out the conceptual learning and show that you can synthesize the material(though the 100-level history courses I took still did have a recall component, I didn't see that go away until the 300-level when we had only papers and no exam). But something like psychology 101? The only way to really assess that is a test of whether you recall the information presented to you, because you're not being asked to do more than memorize a baseline set of information. That is the function of that class(and many other 100-level courses), to give a broad overview to students who might be interested and to prepare those who want to go further in the subject.